1.24.2016

The Blizzard of 2016: An Illustrated Prose Poem

Snow ages us.  One day after the 2016 blizzard, which broke all local records, we Baltimoreans are still confined to four walls, multiplied by how many rooms earned, rented or inherited.  

Snow falls, fells us into the future: tomorrow I will be sitting on the porch doing nothing save watching a squirrel nibble at a collapsing pumpkin, softened after a three-month-long stay on an uneven step; today a wizening septuagenarian is doing nothing but reading, talking--and, of course, writing--while sipping cocoa from a rocking chair before a crackling hearth.  

A crick in the knee feels like a harbinger of a figurative crack in the wall through which I, like us all, must eventually pass, into a landscape where snow is endless and never melts--

I hear the voice of an angel just beyond my front door.  It is my wife's. Will you please stop writing and help me clear a path? Inevitability opens my cage.  Blow, snow blow, shouts an intermittently youthful, unbent Lear, as he shovels snow into the wind. 










Prose Translation: O you beautiful flake-time!/Wherever I look I see snow/ Snow's so cool even though white/Beautiful, leisurely flake-time!

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